Reddit Text Cleaner — TTS-Ready Narration

Reddit Text Cleaner

Reddit and forum text is full of stuff that wrecks text-to-speech: markdown asterisks, link syntax, "Edit:" stamps, emoji, and abbreviations like AITA that a voice reads letter by letter. This actor cleans all of that out and hands back narration that's ready to feed into a TTS engine. It's built for people generating Reddit story videos or audio at scale, where the cleanup step needs to be cheap and predictable.

How it works

Pure rules, no model. It runs a fixed pipeline of regex passes (strip markdown and links, drop edit-stamps and emoji, expand abbreviations, then optionally rewrite profanity), splits the result into sentences, and returns it. Same input always gives the same output, and it returns instantly.

Input

Nothing is strictly required, but you need to pass text one way or another. Use text for a single block, or texts for a batch. If both are present they're all processed.

Output

One dataset item per input text. The cleaned narration is in cleaned, and ttsSegments is that same text split into sentences if you want to render audio per line. You also get wordCount, sentenceCount, charCount, readTimeSeconds (based on your wpm), a hookScore for the opening line, and the truncated original.

Example

{
  "text": "AITA for leaving? **So** here's the _story_. Check [this](https://x.com).\n\nEdit: thanks for the awards! TL;DR: I left.",
  "expandAbbreviations": true,
  "profanityMode": "soft"
}

Pricing

$0.20 per 1,000 cleaned texts ($0.0002 each), plus $0.001 each time a run starts. Flat rate: no volume tiers, no plan gates, no subscription.

Because texts takes a batch, the start fee is paid once per run rather than once per post — cleaning 500 Reddit posts in a single run costs $0.10 plus one $0.001 start. There is no AI key to buy and no third-party API behind it, so that is the entire cost.

Notes

Everything here is rule-based, so there's no OpenAI key needed and nothing to configure for the AI path. The trade-off is that abbreviation and profanity handling cover a curated list rather than every possible variant, so an obscure acronym may pass through untouched.